Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

~~~

They sat me at the table of nowhere-else-to-put-‘ems
and partnered me with the only other poet, who’d shut
his yap—I’m quoting here—at the unholy age of 43
for pissing off politicos, all of whom own, if they
haven’t eBayed them, signed first editions from 1973,
when he still had the poet’s voice and spark.
The wedding theme was chicory blue. He wore
his bloom pinned to a loose embroidered
shirt like old Cubans wear in the city park.Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

Excuse me? Since he already knew my name,
I didn’t grasp the question was for me. He carried
on. You still swallowing that rot of privilege, still
buying the schtick of downtrodden versus you?
I despise the cliché, but how’s that workin’ for ya?
When I was young, I parked rich men’s cars
to pay for the smoke that brought the muse—
until the money came. Then, hell, all the freedom
I’d protested & pushed against, I threw behind bars.And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

***
The open bar ran out of wine halfway through
the night, which cleared most of the hall. The groom
announced an open mic and looking straight at me,
requested a miracle. I turned a sweaty crimson.
My de-versed friend leaned over. Relax, every poet
comes to the messianic borderland. He tapped my heart.
It’s part of the gig. Trick is, to write your way through it
like you own the place. Now, dilettantes and debutantes,
watch ‘em, they’ll stand at the border and humbly fart.I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart.

To my horror, he took out a Sharpie, the same
blue shade of the chicory centerpiece and started
drawing on the white linen tablecloth like a kid,
like a buffoon. What are you doing? Shocked,
I spilled the last of my bordeaux. It’s okay, he said.
The bride is my niece. I paid for the stars
and the waxing moon. He kept drawing. We do love
to bitch about our families, to throw spit wads and
stones in so-called solidarity against whatever jars.I am the Negro, bearing slavery’s scars.

Okay, so what? Am I not the slaver too?
The tyrant spewing dictates from my place
of knowing best? Tell me, how long am I obliged
to hold everybody’s cloaks of feeling bad? What if
I’m ready now to feel fine? Every day, every minute
marks the anniversary of some historic stand
that got knocked over bad, of unities turned down
in favour of shame flipped over—we call that pride.
Broaden your horizons, we all wear the brand.I am the red man driven from the land.

The tree he’d sketched was a great spreadsheet.
Count back half a dozen plagues, and we’re all kin.
Genghis is your Asian uncle; you’ve got Cleopatra’s
depressive tendencies. Let the cousins howl, sure,
but sing what you got to—kindly, loud or soft. We’re
all indigenes, so let the voice of our common genes speak.
While I was studying the tree table, the guests who’d left
returned, each carrying jugs of the very best. The poet
got up to pour, and I felt rhyme like tears begin to leak:I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

~~~

In the traditional glosa, a writer uses four lines of a master poet’s quatrain to weave a 4-stanza collaboration. In this instance, Langston Hughes’s poem insisted on my including two extra lines as prologue. For those of you who haven’t heard of the glosa and would like to know more, here are links to a couple of books, by me, on that very topic.

The mongering in misery is brisk today.
A pint of pain for three quarts of sting,
fragments of dead love affairs, whaddya say?
I’ll even throw in the nasty, helpful thing
I said to a friend a few minutes ago.
I’m quick to bring the spirits of everybody low.
There’s no greater trafficker in grief than me,
with expertise in creeping, gnawing jealousy.
You got nothing to gain, everything to lose—
may as well put your trust in me.
The closest coin is yours to choose.

Wish I knew how I’d managed to stray
into this ville of shops that can only bring
me wriggling anxiety and disarray.
This poison pit stop has me wondering:
I have a fine purse that’s just below
half full, no earthly need for me to blow
it here, where a disengaged economy
deflates and battles for supremacy.
Who was it said, I’m quick to bruise?
You cling too much to skewéd memory.
The closest coin is yours to choose.

Aah, yes, the great philosopher, Duprés!
I’ve read him too. Brilliant how he’ll wing
you out of sunny skies to sullen gray,
two seconds flat. But here, ooh! The bling
and crap, I guarantee, will make you feel so
fabulous, you’ll want to stay to grow
your business here in toiling perpetuity
by investing in how alike and sad we
are. Consciousness rising, that’s the cruise
you wanna book, right here, see?
The closest coin is yours to choose.

The monger’s got me in a power play.
I feel my will and joints slow stiffening.
The sign I couldn’t read well yesterday
above his wares and oily grinning
head says, Come on, baby, just let go!
Rigor mortis of the mind will show
you, an impulsive shopping spree
cures all. We throw in guilt for free!
How ‘bout it? Cheaper than booze,
a slow, lazy drag to the cemetery!
The closest coin is yours to choose.

I look him straight in the mug. You play
dirty. I play differently. I love ca-ching
as much as anyone, but you, you bray
the same old donkey chords of suffering.
I thought at first I saw a special glow
in you—still do, too bad. I have to go.
You’ve built yourself a match stick society
that flames to ashes every night. The fee
you charge for feeling good, your dos
and don’ts, all sorted, they don’t interest me.
The closest coin is yours to choose,

and I am spending mine most happily. Be
well, my friend. I hope you’ll one day see
resentment held is counterfeit and strews
more prolonged misery for you, not me.
The closest coin is yours to choose.

Coming toward an answer from a vagrant
point of view, setting free the saddled sheep
of woolly thoughts to graze by inconstant
streams and thunderheads may not achieve deep
inroads into popularity, which,
given that I don’t know how to manage
what you think, appeals. And although I twitch,
unaccustomed to the free and savage,
I remind myself I’ve navigated
by means of rearview mirrors all my life.
A bit of forward thinking, belated
though it is, may be the sweet anti-strife
my mirrored self has yearned for all these years—
a clear reflection blurred with happy tears.

~~~

I had a bit of fun this morning, revisiting the mirror writing favoured by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks. Some years back, when I journaled without the slightest notion of writing poetry, I would mirror-write on the left page, and use my non-dominant hand on the right. I loved the feeling of how it slowed my thinking down—or that thing we call thinking, which I’m not convinced it is.

I opted to use fountain pen and ink to write this sonnet (Shakespearean, in rhyme scheme) on heavy vellum. What you see in the image is the one and only draft. Freed from technology, I did all the editing in my head, which I have to say, felt fabulous! My only props were ababcdcdefefgg, written nearby, and a mirror, which I used now and again to check that the writing was legible.

The trickiest part, oddly enough, happened at the computer. I couldn’t type from my own backward writing. I had to trascribe it from a mirror. Also glad I don’t have to drive anywhere today!

Let bygones and the up-and-coming rest
easy in your mind. The balance beam you
walk knows no diameter; the center
point is always you, aligned with Big True.
Everything that radiates now here, best
of best you will achieve. You are sky blue,
adoring pink. Every room you enter
has been waiting. The ways that you renew
are stuff of legend, don’t you know? Banter
in the highest places tells me you’re blessed.
Who knew? I did, and know it still. So, be
still…or noisy, crazy romping fun. Dance
in your spotlight, forget what we see—
just drink in every admiring glance!

At depths designed
and measureless, I roll
out days in meters, first
abstracted by desire, then
choosing, made attirable.

Because I am both tailor
and the maker of my sails,
I let the barnacles of
disconnected metaphor
attach their frisky selves
to whichever barge, canoe
or carpet takes their fancy.

I am we, and we are all,
by the grace of a grand
slipstream, traveling
for free;

and should I spy
a seahorse in the way
you curl away

convinced you’ve
joined the wingnuts of
predictable thinkers in a
bucket, growing colonies of
rust and backwardness, I shall
pay my respects to your iron age
ways and sail away, ignoring any urge
to acidify your jubilation, much less
suggest it’s time you grew to bronze.

And when my animated paisley,
as all patterned chaos will, attempts
to polarize to stripes or dots of black
and white, or if I catch a glimpse of
epaulets, encroaching remnants of
defense, I’m free to shred or bolt.

What I resolve to never do
within or out—the only dotted
line of paisley I’ve agreed to sign—
is stoop to understand the nature
of a pattern that appalls, repels,
a you that’s not rolled out for me.

Muddied dye is the only
tragedy—and even still,
all things once over-stirred
by memory and grudge will
find their way, if undisturbed,
to juvenate and rise again;

and all the ages, bitter,
sweet, that I have been
and ages yet to be, will
carry on unfurling placidly.

You, who chase markets,
predictor of trends, I need you
to give up the ghost of the writer
you tend. I know you don’t know me—
the cut and the grind of your lens
amplifies everything I am not.

If it helps to pretend
I’m a trick of the light from
too many nights at your desk
or the meds to control your attack
of the dreads, I don’t care. Just
for this moment, get out of
the hair of the writer
who’s gone to a shipload
of trouble to summon me here,
where you are old news, though
a headline, the 10 millionth ripple on
a pond where the stone, unaware she’s
a diamond, now sinks all alone to the
silt and the muck, hearing bubbles
of guilt, thinking thoughts like
I’m f*cked, when she ought
to be gleaming the brighter for
all that you’ve stirred, so again,
marketeer, do not lend me
your ear, just GET OUT!

II – Assemblage

Hello, dear writer,
a pleasure to meet you
alone for the very first time
through these inlets of rhyme
where tycoons of business
lack sense and the timing that
comes with the work that you do
to create how we sail from the jetties
and airs of Paul Getty and heirs
to a seamless provoking
of all that impairs.

Though I have no real name,
you may call me Lacy. I’m your
highest ideal, I’m the reason you
came. I’ve been growing like blazes
and making you crazy creative, do you
hear? Never lazy! But you, you’ve been
reared by well-meaning posteriors to agree
that a park bench or stump is the finest
career. Why, look at the endless succession
of buts that have muffled and squashed you,
while you, gifted writer, are plus, plus, & more!
Now, get up off the floor and listen, no buts.
If you hear them creep in, little bums, just
go back to Ordinance and read me again.

III – Agitation

How can I put this?
Agitation is everything.
The discomfort you feel
is a story that’s reeling you
in like a fish—maybe true, may
be wild, a confession, a rant.
What you never must do
is to dribble the story
like a bucket of worms
for approval, attention.
Baiting too soon is
the biggest mistake
of the writers who die,
the flounders, the flakes.

On those days
when the words are
elusive, stay away from
the news of literary markets.
They will only confuse between
dis- and encourage. A writer is
something outside and beyond units
sold, saturation. You’re leading edge,
friend! Best thing you can do is
indulge relaxation.

Start to believe
in those moments
of ease, you’re surrounded
by masters who went on
before you—call them ghosts,
friendly hosts, doesn’t matter,
they’re real. Read the best of the
best of them, never descend, and
address them as if they were here in
the room. “I can be just like you.” Tell
them: “Yes, I might even be better!”

Your writing, I promise, will start up
again. Succumb every dawn to that small
agitation, and soon the whale will turn to
see what is biting him. You will be the splash
you came here to be, the diamond at the center,
and I the lace you have quietly donned.

Beware the odd surface
of what lies ahead
that you’ve prepaved
with memories of us
who once fed a grand
duchy of ten thousand
men and their families,
their pea hens and cows…
only now, you are stuck
at a console of digital
images, cursing
the slowness of data
that keeps to itself how
we once ruled a kingdom
of wood sprites and elves,
and the research you do to
dispel, heaven knows, a
residual thrill that refuses
to give up its clamp on your
heel, casts a damp that would
otherwise stimulate pathways
more even, to prove there’s
no end to the depths of our
magic. Monotonous silence
we couldn’t imagine when
bluebells and cockerels
danced jigs at our window
will vanish like vapour when
your cell blocks of cinder,
at last, disengage, and
the name you were known
by refreshes and calls me again
to odd surfaces just up ahead.

~~~

The sudden appearance of this peculiar sign on our neighbourhood walking trail refused to leave my cranium until I’d given it some kind of raison d’être.

into a flame, revealing high shelves
where all the selves of one book of life
lay scrolled in a chrysalis of cells.

Instructions we will leave, good wife,
in the purveying of great relief,
joyful and wealthy, absent of strife.

III

In every endeavour, three is chief.
Ask with trust. Relax, allow. Receive.
A looping pair, delight and mischief

are the cursive pen of Logos, word,
the poet’s ink, the poet’s gold, met
halfway if not more by our great lord

of commerce, quick-silvered, wings of jet;
his flash outruns, outshines the copper
coins and bits of markets that don’t let.

IV

Though mulish still, she is well trained. Her
ear is glued to all we’re saying. She’ll
steal us blind; we’ll come around to better

sight and so on, both deeply and well
the poet is heard. She knows that we
never left nor ceased to toll her bell.

Here ends our treatise, friends, that will free
any poet who wishes to see
abundance wed with infinity.

***
The priestess gathers her I / you / we
and sails off to meet her destiny.

Finis

~~~

Post Script: A Recap on Poetic Form

If you’ve been reading Oceantics for a while, you’ll know that I enjoy playing with the fixed verse forms handed down to us from medieval troubadours. Those fabulous men and women were not only composers of music and verse, they were storytellers. They developed wit and wisdom that informed, entertained, and, no doubt, inflamed. The best of them, I suspect, held no expectations of a long life span.

For this narrative series, I employed four forms beginning with the sestina. Part II is a septime, for which I can provide no Wiki link, as I developed the form myself. It’s basically the seven version of the six-based sestina, with a more chaotic end word sequence.

In Part III, the 8-syllable, 8-line ottava rima (octave) gave me the dramatic tightening I wanted for that most unhappy setting.The concluding episode I’m calling an ennead, the Greek term for a set of nine. 9-syllable, 9-line poems, apparently, are rare. Research brings up the word nonet, which sounds to me like a hair stiffening product for the food industry.

An ennead, on the other hand, will navigate you through the 3-tiered deities of ancient Egypt, as perceived by the Greeks. I used the terza rima rhyme scheme for its delightful tractor-like pull.

So, in brief, my form choices were 6, 7, 8, 9. If you’re an aficionado of Near East mysticism, you’ll have no trouble identifying the thorny tree. Thank you for reading!

Would you read my poems, kind sir?
You’ve commented before. My heart’s
in chaos, life’s a hurtful blur.
Oh, please, I’m not sure that it starts
to rhyme quite right. You cause a stir
with all you write—you’re off the charts.
Why do you walk away from me?
I thought we were a family.

I watched the hungry poetess,
her hands outstretched, creative gain
ignored and trampled. Caring less
than what I ought, I looked again
at clustered groups around her, pressed
into each other’s words, their drain
of spirits puddling at my feet,
thin shoulders sagging in defeat.

I turned to face my priestess friend.
I thought you said that poetry
is welcome here. It’s a dead end.
What is this place? Poems for free,
but no one cares. Is this a trend?
If so, I’d sooner talk to trees,
pin my verses to a cedar
where reception will be sweeter.

She replied, this is the beggars’
market, where no one gets to choose.
You’ll learn the rules from your betters,
pick up a trick or two, and lose
your bearings as they slip fetters
around your authenticity,
in staggering complicity.

We passed a man knee deep in tears,
known for the world’s best love sonnets.
Crowded by lust and stung by fears,
his voice drones like dying hornets.
He writes sometimes of bygone years,
living in a battered Comet.
All he can do now is seduce
new virgin talents of their juice.

If you can figure out who owns
this marketplace of beggars, you
might stand a chance of writing poems
to transcend the spies and thieves who
served you for awhile. Not all loans
are bad; not all friends are untrue.
I hope to see you when the fourth
of the distorters runs his course.

I walked along the poets’ stalls
avoiding eyes and plaintive cries,
read posters plastered on the walls:
Poets never make a buck. Prize
for best free verse—twin kewpie dolls!
Artists starve while big business thrives.
Forget your hopes, come live with us.
There’s lots of room in this big bust!

I snuck away while poets slammed
each other’s work to keep the good
ones down; crawled under bleachers crammed
with talent petrified. I could
not say yet how they had been damned,
but staying would not help. The wood
I reached was of some thorny tree.
Smiling, I pinned my poetry.